Research

I study the cognitive shortcuts that the human brain takes in order to perform feats of perception, attention, and memory. I’m particularly interested in predictability, and in the specializations of different sensory modalities.

Sensory modalities

Different senses are not only specialized to detect environmental energy; the neural machinery that supports vision and audition is also specialized to perform certain kinds of computations. Visual input is intrinsically spatial, and vision has an affinity for spatial information; auditory input is one-dimensional over time, and audition has a corresponding affinity for temporal information. I perform behavioral experiments testing whether and how these affinities interact in working memory, and fMRI experiments investigating how sensory-biased cortical areas may be recruited for specific tasks.

The neural response to a rarely-occurring distractor produces a negative electrical field over visual/posterior areas of the brain. This corresponds with a dramatic enhancement of the effect of the distractor, such that people are fastest and most accurate when the distractor matches the target (top green line), and slowest and least accurate when it is different (bottom green line). Adapted from Noyce & Sekuler (2014), Neuropsychologia.

Prediction

The human brain often works in a predictive, feedforward manner, recognizing a familiar context and anticipating upcoming events. I’m interested in how this learning happens (including what it means to “recognize a familiar context”), how anticipation supports cognition, and what happens when a novel, unexpected event occurs instead. I use behavioral studies and EEG/ERP techniques to determine the neural mechanisms that reflect this learning and expectation, and those that respond to deviant or unexpected events.